New data analysis competitions

How-to

Supported by Google Jigsaw, the GDELT Project monitors the world's
broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in
over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations,
counts, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving
our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform
for computing on the entire world.

Privacy

The Intercept interviewed five individuals familiar with Kogan's work for
SCL. All declined to be identified, citing concerns about an ongoing inquiry
at Cambridge and fears of possible litigation. Two sources familiar with the
SCL project told The Intercept that Kogan had arranged for more than 100,000
people to complete the Facebook survey and download an app. A third source
with direct knowledge of the project said that Global Science Research
obtained data from 185,000 survey participants as well as their Facebook
friends. The source said that this group of 185,000 was recruited through a
data company, not Mechanical Turk, and that it yielded 30 million usable
profiles. No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that "likes" and
demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by
political operatives hired to influence American voters.

As with the fake news issue, I still think this is a completely different
problem, one that essentially boild down to cultural differences: whether
privacy has any real value in today's common social norms. If people treated
data uploaded to Facebook (or anywhere in the cloud, for that matter, unless
it's properly encrypted) as essentially public and free-for-all, things
would be different.

This pairing of interest with ignorance has created a perfect storm for a
misinformation epidemic. The outsize demand for stories about AI has created
a tremendous opportunity for impostors to capture some piece of this market.